Flashes of Panic

When I was taking the “Introduction to Computer Security” class this spring, the professor warned us that from now on we’d be watching hacker-themed movies (e.g. “Hackers,” though she admitted that “Sneakers” wasn’t too bad,) and laughing at parts we weren’t supposed to laugh at.

After all, thinking of “Hackers,” who ever saw a “virus” with a GUI showing its progress? They made security look like a video game (despite the comments on IMDB.)

So I wasn’t terribly disappointed when “Firewall” was the in-flight movie on the way out here. After all, what’s more amusing than Harrison Ford sitting down at a terminal and tapping in a quick access-control rule to stop a distributed brute-force SSH attack? (Answer: the response of the guy who had been monitoring the attack, who makes a wondering comment like, “And it’s resistant to false positives, too!”) If only everyone was so impressed by the ability to write firewall rules, right?

Fax-scanner on computer screen? Ah hah hah. OCR which could then automatically recognize (correctly!) all the account numbers in the resulting (massive graphics) file without making one mistake? It’s improved lately, but not that much. I do have to give them credit for the iPod-as-portable-storage plot tool; security experts have been warning about the iPod’s ability to violate corporate security for a few years now. And how does that guy’s phone camera get such high-resolution shots of a monitor?

I guess the less you know about these things, the easier it is to suspend disbelief and just enjoy the action.